2. Those who are naive enough to believe that Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor could be spun off into a profit-making enterprise need to look at the century-long backlog of huge and very expensive maintenance that needs to be done to make that viable. And in the meantime, Amtrak’s cash cow is facing competition from services like this one:

Some people want Amtrak to focus on the Northeast Corridor, and have little or no service anywhere else. Even in the very unlikely scenario that Congress approved such a plan, we’d end up with a future that would look like today’s VIA Rail Canadian train 1, which ran 37 hours late somewhere near Edmonton.